This London Philharmonic programme was one to inspire big thoughts about creation – of the world, or of music, or both.

The conductor was Thomas Adès, and his In Seven Days, a reflection on the biblical creation story for piano and orchestra, formed the centrepiece. At its premiere in 2008, the music was integrated with video art; here, it stood alone.

From the start, the music establishes itself at the two extremes of piano pitch, as if to remind us that the creation story begins with acts of division. It plays out as a kind of homage to Conlon Nancarrow’s impossible player-piano studies, in which high becomes low and fast becomes slow in such a way that one is unaware of a changeover. This is especially true for the piano writing, dispatched here with expressive brilliance by Kirill Gerstein, who gave us more Adès in his warm and delicate encore, the Mazurka No 2.

In Seven Days was premiered by a small ensemble. Played by a symphony orchestra, it seemed to represent the composer at his most benign. Do fuller forces take away some of the work’s bite? Perhaps, especially given a lack of crispness in the strings at the opening – something that had also taken the edge off an otherwise driven performance of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements earlier.

With the Adès having directed our minds to the fictional creation story, Witold Lutosławski’s masterly Third Symphony perhaps represented the scientific one: a big bang followed by a wealth of quietly developing detail, full of individual impulse. It was a dynamic climax to the programme, fighting talk at the start of an orchestra’s season.